Oracle Blog

Melanie Parsons Gao's Adventures Living, Working and Playing in China

Tuesday Jan 29, 2008

Sun's Beijing Engineering Office had its annual Chinese New Year's party on January 18 and it was awesome! The food and the venue were fine but the best part was the show. It's completely employee-driven - people from various departments had spent hours rehearsing skits, dances, songs and performances. The show last year was spectactular and I was skeptical that it could be any better this year, but it was. Glitzy costumes, professional make-up, instruments, props, lights, camera, action!

Some people from my team and I sang "The Twelve Bugs of Christmas", but since this was a New Year's Party we called it "The Twelve Bugs of New Year's". Our director Mimi scheduled her annual visit so she could be here for the party and accompany us on the guitar, and we were voted the Best Act of the Show! This auspicious award comes with a 500 RMB cash prize, which we will use for an afternoon of karaoke.

Here's me introducing our act. (FWIW, my team does have a goal for FY2009 to make me look younger and thinner in all photos. Either that or learn to use PhotoShop before you publish those snapshots, gang!)

This is us singing "Ask for a dump!"

Sandy on the piano and Mimi on guitar.

By the way, here are the words to the song we sang. I'm afraid I have no idea who wrote this. But they are brilliant, whoever they are."For the 12th bug of New Year's my manager said to me,
Tell them it's a feature,
Say it's not supported
Change the documentation
Blame it on the hardware
Find a way around it
Say they need an upgrade
Reinstall the software
Ask for a dump!
Run with the debugger
Try to reproduce it
Ask them how they did it, and
See if they can do it again."

We also sang a beautiful Chinese folk song called "Mo Li Hua", which means "Jasmine" in English.